Race, Resistance and the Ainu of Japan

Richard M. Siddle

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781134826803
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Once thought of as a 'vanishing people', the Ainu are now reasserting both their culture and their claims to be the 'indigenous' people of Japan. Race, Resistance and the Ainu of Japan is the first major study to trace the outlines of Ainu history. It explores the ways in which competing versions of Ainu identity have been constructed and articulated, shedding light on the way modern relations between the Ainu and the Japanese have been shaped.

1 ‘Race’, ethnicity and the Ainu

Despite the pervasive myth of Japan as a ‘homogeneous nation’, between 4–6 per cent of the Japanese population are members of minority groups, many of whom ‘suffer considerable discrimination’.¹ Consideration of the historical formation and marginalisation of minority populations like the Koreans and Burakumin has stimulated a growing interest among historians and sociologists in the discourses of ‘race’ and ‘nation’ in Japanese society, and how these discourses have shaped constructs of Self and Other.² Scholarly interest in the Ainu, however, has been largely confined within the disciplines of anthropology and archaeology (and, to a lesser extent, history and linguistics) and has mainly concerned itself with the reconstruction of ‘traditional’ Ainu culture as part of wider investigations into Japanese origins. The few scholars who have attempted to assess the importance of ‘race’ and ethnicity within the context of Ainu–Wajin relations have foundered on inadequate or anachronistic formulations of these notoriously slippery analytical concepts. Most fail to identify either the social and economic bases of ‘racial’ discrimination, or the historical process through which images of the Ainu as an excluded and subordinated Other have been reproduced.

A few examples will suffice. While the work of the American scholars Peng and Geiser in the 1960s, for instance, represented a great advance over the Ainu as a ‘vanishing people’ paradigm exemplified by anthropologists like Hilger, their explanation of the exclusion of the Ainu from ‘full admittance to Japanese society’ as merely the operation of ‘informal social processes’ ignored the centrality of racism in the formation of colonial relations of domination over the Ainu.³ In contrast, other scholars like Baba and Emori have actively sought the roots of discrimination in the colonial encounter, but their analyses have ultimately foundered on the lack of a clear theoretical conceptualisation of ‘race’ and a failure to consider the wider social and historical contexts in which the discourse of ‘race’ gained acceptance as a common-sense explanation of Japanese superiority and Ainu subordination.⁴ Work on Ainu ethnicity displays similar weaknesses. Both premodern and modern Ainu identity have been little studied and understood, even though Ainu identity is now more strongly emphasised and celebrated by the Ainu themselves than in any other period of their recent history. With the exception of Sjöberg, scholars have displayed little interest in the analysis of the present Ainu movement as a creative attempt to fuse culture and politics in a new discourse of ethnicity.⁵

A systematic analysis of the interplay between ‘race’ and ethnicity within the context of the creation of the modern Japanese nation-state is critical to an understanding of Ainu–Wajin relations, both past and present. Under specific historical and material conditions, two competing discourses of ‘natural difference’ – the ‘dying race’ and the ‘Ainu nation’ -have served to shape Ainu–Wajin relations in a dynamic and continuing process. Since ‘race’ and ethnicity represent the modes in which the Ainu have been marginalised, and have responded to that marginalisation, during the incorporation of Hokkaidō into the modern Japanese state, this chapter explores both the nature of these concepts and the historical contexts in which they have been articulated.

‘RACE’ AND NATION IN MODERN JAPAN

As a biological concept, ‘race’, in the sense of the taxonomic classification of Homo sapiens into subspecies on the basis of phenotype, has been outdated by the development of genetics.⁶ The notion, however, is employed by many social scientists in the guise of a ‘social race’, ‘a group of people who are socially defined in a given society as belonging together because of physical markers such as skin pigmentation, hair texture, facial features, stature, and the like’.⁷ ‘Race’ is therefore conceived of as a socially constructed notion of biological difference used by one group to categorise another in the context of unequal power relations.⁸ Miles, in particular, argues strongly against tendencies to reify ‘race’:

There are no ‘races’ and therefore no ‘race relations’. There is only a belief that there are such things, a belief that is used by some social groups to construct an Other (and therefore the Self) in thought as a prelude to exclusion and domination, and by other social groups to define Self (and so to construct an Other) as a means of resisting that exclusion.⁹

The object of study, argues Miles, should be racism, an ideology that ‘constructs (real or imagined) difference as natural not only in order to exclude, but additionally, in order to marginalise a social collectivity within a particular constellation of relations of domination’.¹⁰ Within a context of unequal power relations, real or imagined biological difference can become the definitive criterion for categorisation, exclusion and domination. It is not only populations that share distinct phenotypical characteristics (like black skin) that are categorised as ‘naturally different’ in this way; Miles points to the Irish, Jews and Gypsies as examples of culturally distinct European populations ‘racialised’ on the basis of imagined biological difference.¹¹ Such ideas do not result from inherent human propensities to discriminate but are articulated in certain historical contexts by groups located within specific material and power relations:

In certain historical conjunctures and under specific material conditions, human beings attribute certain biological characteristics with meaning in order to differentiate, to exclude, and to dominate: reproducing the idea of ‘race’, they create a racialised Other and simultaneously they racialise themselves.¹²

The historical and material context in which the Ainu became a racialised and subordinated population was one of colonialism. Although relations between the indigenous inhabitants of Hokkaidō and their southern neighbours predate the production of historical records, archaeological sites in Hokkaidō provide evidence of trade dating back to the early centuries of the Christian era. By the seventeenth century trade relations had taken on an increasingly unequal nature as the Japanese extended control over the region and its ‘barbarian’ inhabitants. The process of establishing Japanese domination greatly accelerated after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 when the modernising Japanese state established a colonial order in the newly acquired territory of Hokkaidō. While Hokkaidō is not recognised by most Japanese today as a colony, the material and ideological relations of domination established over the original inhabitants of the region after 1868 clearly fall within the bounds of what Beckett terms a colonial order:

A colonial order arises when the state that has annexed a territory formally and systematically discriminates between the conquering invaders and the subject indigenes in such a way as to entrench the differences between them and to foster their economic, political, and cultural inequality. This discrimination is sustained by some form of ideology that justifies the domination of the indigenous population in terms of differences of race, mentality, moral qualities, cultural advancement, religion, or historic destiny.¹³

Modernisation, mass immigration, and capitalist development in the new territory of Hokkaidō drastically altered Ainu–Wajin relations, transforming pre-Restoration Confucian and folk images of barbarian Ainu in the process. As the Tokugawa (1603–1868) world-view gave way under the impact of rapid political, economic and social change and the import of Western knowledge, Ainu dispossession and subordination came to be explained and legitimised in the language of ‘race’. In other words, the Ainu became a ‘racialised’ population.

As Japan underwent the transition to its own version of modernity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the notion of ‘race’ became accepted by both scholar and layman alike as one of the ‘common-sense’ categories that served to distinguish human populations. Such views were also widespread in late nineteenth century Europe and America, where ‘races’ were perceived to exist objectively as natural communities that reproduced themselves in time and space and possessed innate and immutable characteristics. These ideas developed within the context of advances in scientific knowledge and technology that greatly facilitated industrial and imperial expansion. With much of the globe ruled by a handful of European nation-states after the ‘scramble for Africa’ at the end of the nineteenth century, the cultural and technological differences between colonial elites and subject populations were increasingly explained in terms of ‘racial’ difference and such scientific ‘truths’ as Darwin’s paradigm of evolution. Although there were differences in approach between and within Empires, for most of the citizens of the imperial nation-states it was self-evident that relations of domination were a result of the natural propensity for ‘superior races’ to conquer and rule ‘inferior’ ones. This common-sense explanation also served to justify colonial domination and render that domination inevitable.¹⁴ Seen in these terms, social and economic inequality was no more than an expression of ‘natural’ difference.

Racialised subject populations like the Ainu were thus perceived as innately inferior precisely because they were subordinated. The circularity of such an argument is obvious, but logical consistency is not essential to common-sense understanding, a concept first developed by Gramsci in an attempt to explain the social processes of ideology – the ways in which dominant ideologies arise, are reproduced, and achieve ‘hegemony’. As explained by Miles:

[Commonsense] refers to the complex of ideas and perceptions, organized without coherence, which are a consequence of both historical tradition and direct experience and by which people negotiate their daily life … the internally contradictory and incoherent set of ideas through which daily lives are lived.¹⁵

The naturalisation of ‘race’ as a common-sense category of difference in Japan did not happen overnight, but was part of a much larger process of reinterpretation of meaning in the face of widespread social disruption after the Meiji Restoration. During the late nineteenth century, Japanese constructs of Self and Other underwent a radical transformation as the new leadership steered Japan towards industrial development and a place on the world stage as a modern ‘nation’. The rapid social change that ensued undermined the common-sense frameworks of understanding by which individuals had negotiated their daily lives under the Tokugawa. For those who lived through such changes, like the novelist Natsume Sōseki, such mental dislocation was akin to waging ‘war against oneself’.¹⁶ Not only did old certainties dissolve but new knowledge entered Japan. The leadership of Japan embarked upon a conscious policy of modernisation along Western lines, motivated by the need to build a ‘prosperous country and a strong army’ (fukoku kyōhei) in the face of Western power, exemplified in the so-called ‘unequal treaties’. Many foreigners were hired to introduce Western knowledge and technology to Japan. As Dower has pointed out, during this initial period in which the Japanese turned to the West for education, both natural and social sciences in Europe and the United States were dominated by the evolutionary paradigms of ‘race’ inspired by the work of Darwin.¹⁷ The introduction of Darwinian thought in the early Meiji period (1868–1912) was the beginning of a process which, by the end of the period, would see common-sense Japanese notions of national Self and Other increasingly influenced by the idea of ‘race’.

While both ‘race’ and ‘nation’ were new constructs for Meiji period Japanese, they built on deeply rooted notions of difference that had been present at all levels of Tokugawa society. For the elites, it was the essentially Confucian distinction between civilised and barbarian that served to mark the outsider. As Japan redefined its identity vis-à-vis China during the Tokugawa period, nativist scholars like Motoori Norinaga attempted to challenge Confucian orthodoxy by stressing that civilisation and moral purity actually originated in Japan. Initially only a minor current in Tokugawa intellectual life, nativist ideas began to reach a wider audience as the Bakufu atrophied in the face of internal change and a new foreign threat in the early nineteenth century. Strident ideologues like Hirata Atsutane attributed animal qualities to Europeans while extolling Japanese uniqueness and superiority:

Japanese differ completely from and are superior to the peoples of China, India, Russia, Holland, Siam, Cambodia, and all other countries of the world, and for us to have called our country the Land of the Gods was not mere vainglory.¹⁸

A widening geographical knowledge among intellectual elites like those involved in rangaku (Dutch Studies) had also resulted in an increasing awareness of peoples of colour. Nevertheless, while early curiosity and admiration for African sailors had given way by the eighteenth century to more derogatory beliefs, civilised and barbarian remained the overriding categories for the classification of the peoples of the world.¹⁹

In contrast, commoners held an image of the outsider that was tied less to Confucianism and more to the worlds of folklore an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Maps
• Introduction
• 1 ‘Race’, ethnicity and the Ainu
• 2 Barbarians and demons
• 3 Former natives
• 4 The dying race
• 5 With shining eyes: Ainu protest and resistance, 1869–1945
• 6 Ainu liberation and walfare colonialism: the new Ainu politics and the state’s response
• 7 Beginning to walk for ourselves: the emergence of the Ainu nation
• Afterword
• Appendix 1 The Hokkaidō Former Natives Protection Act of 1899
• Appendix 2 New Law Concerning the Ainu People (Draft)
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index